So Many Descendants
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
A couple of years ago (pre-COVID) I decided to do a Descendants research project – rather than identifying as many of my ancestors as I could, I decided to try to identify as many descendants as I could from a particular ancestor. I chose my 3rd great-grandfather Spencer Arnold and his wife Martha Pease Arnold. My goal was to find their living descendants – roughly, my 3rd and 4th cousins at various levels of removal – to plan a family reunion. I was focused on planning a reunion in the summer of 2021, to honor the 200th anniversary of the birth of Miles Arnold (one of Spencer and Martha’s sons and my 2nd great-grandfather). Well, we know what happened in 2020 and 2021. Needless to say, this project was moved to the back burner – way, way, back.
When I saw this week’s prompt in the list of questions for this year’s challenge, I thought back to that descendants’ tree. I poked around in it a little, but realized I was kind of bored with it. So I looked around to find something else to do, and decided to do a descendants’ tree for my 3rd great-grandparents on my mother’s side: James and Elizabeth Bilyeu Workman, who lived in the first half of the 19th century.
So how do you make a descendants’ tree on Ancestry? There may be other ways to do this, but here’s what I did.
I began a new tree, identifying James as the “Home person” and Elizabeth as his wife. Hint: to create a tree, you need to put in at least three names, and Ancestry offers you only the option of putting in the parents of the first name you enter. So I put in James’s parents to start the tree.
I opened my main tree in one window and opened my descendants’ tree in another window. (I have an external monitor, so this is actually doable without making the windows so small you can’t read anything.)
Then I began to manually copy the information from my main tree to my descendants’ tree. I couldn’t find a way to cut and paste a whole swath of people into the new tree; if there is a way to do this, I couldn’t figure it out. I just slogged along, doing a bit every time I sat down at my computer.
James had 11 children; three with Elizabeth before she died after the birth of their third child, and 8 with his second wife. That presented me with a LOT of lines to develop. I had already done a significant amount of work with the descendants of James through my 2nd great-grandfather, James Abraham Workman (the first child born to James and Elizabeth), but I hadn’t done much with his siblings’ descendants. I began to flesh out these lineages.
I wasn’t interested in much beyond the bare bones of these people when I began; their names, dates and locations of births and deaths, and identities of their children were all I was after at this point.
Again with the slogging.
After I “finished” (I put this in quotes because I don’t think I’ll ever really “finish”) I downloaded the GEDCOM of my descendants’ tree, converted it to an EXCEL spreadsheet using a free program called Family Tree Analyzer, and then began to work with the spreadsheet to figure out what was going on.
I organized the spreadsheet as my own personal Ahnentafel (ancestor table), ascribing a particular ID number for each person on the tree and sorting them into family groups.
When the spreadsheet revealed significant gaps in my information, I went back to Ancestry to see if I could fill in the information.
It was different to research "forward" rather than "backward." As I moved forward, I began encountering more and more evidence -- until I got to the last decades of the 20th century, when "Private" began to dominate the information I encountered. I began to accumulate obituaries (which often named children) and then social media pages. I discovered that there's a fine line between researching and stalking.
I am not finished with this process. As of this writing, I have identified more 200 descendants of James Workman. I know I’m not finished. So far as I can figure out, only five of his 11 children had children; at least two of the remaining children died as infants, and the other four never married. Of the five who married and had children, three of them (all the children born to James and Elizabeth, his first wife) had large families.
Here's what I know so far:
My root person James Workman had 11 children with two wives
James’s children (my 2nd great aunts or uncles):
William – 8 children
Delia – 3 children
James Abraham – 18 children with two wives (this is my 2nd great-grandfather)
Rebecca – 14 children
Samuel – 8 children
His other children either died before reaching maturity (2) or never married (4)
James’s grandchildren
William’s 8 children had a total of only 7 children
Delia’s 3 children had a total of 9 children
James Abraham’s 18 children had a total of 87 children (4 died in infancy and one never married)
Rebecca’s 14 children had a total of 10 children
Samuel’s 8 children had a total of 18 children
So this means James had a total of 131 grandchildren. That’s a lot of grandchildren.
I’m still working on this descendants’ tree, trying to identify the children of these 131 grandchildren. I’m partway through that, but have a ways to go. I had hoped to be “finished” in time to provide the totals when I wrote this essay, but I’m not. Rather than rush through the math, I’m going to stop now. At some later point I’ll share the spreadsheet I create from all of this.
I’ll give you a quick look at I’m doing next. I used MyMaps (part of the GoogleMaps function) to create customized maps of where people lived. You can tag locations on the maps and create layers to give more information. I’m nowhere near finished with this, but here’s what it looks like so far.
This analysis helps me understand patterns in my family history. My family moved around a lot. The outlier in Texas on the earlier map is my family line; the marker is on the location where my mother was born. But through MyMaps, I have come to undertand that some parts of the family stayed put for generations. This tool helps me understand this dynamic. Plus, it’s a lot of fun!
A beautiful journey.....thank you for sharing.